From the flamboyant and unpredictable Maryska, who scandalises the town when she cuts short her golden tresses, to the eccentric Uncle Pepin, who always has to have a ready supply of furniture to smash when he's angry, Bohumil Hrabal creates a range of enchanting and memorable characters - confirming his status as one of Europe's greatest writers.

Kyiv, 1919. World War I has ended in Western Europe, but to the East, six factions continue to vie for control of Ukraine. Amidst the political turmoil, young Samson Kolechko is forced to place his engineering career on hold. But in the city of Kyiv everything remains up for grabs and new opportunity lurks just around the corner . . .

The three novellas of Farewell, Aylis take place over decades of transition in a country that rather resembles modern-day Azerbaijan.

Ukraine, 2007. Yefim Shulman, husband, grandfather and war veteran, was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow Nina finds a letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession forces them to reassess the man they thought they knew and the country he had defended.

As the author states that her book ‘...is about courage, too, about the out-and-out courage to claim what is rightfully yours, to recognize it, to dig in your heels, and never give away to anyone what is yours, your home, your motherland, your heart, your right to walk with your head held high.... The author calls her novel Daughter part of the war effort. The heroine absorbs both what I (the...

Schlump, written by Hans Herbert Grimm, was published anonymously in 1928 and was one of the first German novels to describe World War I in all its horror and absurdity, and it remains one of the best. What really sets it apart is its remarkable central character. Who is Schlump? A bit of a rascal and a bit of a sweetheart, a victim of his times, an inveterate survivor, maybe even a new type of...

Between Anti-Fascist Society, Socialist Utopia and Lived Jewishness: What did it mean to be Jewish in the GDR? After the Shoah, many Jews made the conscious choice to live in East Germany, to be part of building a new, more equitable socialist society, hoping for greater justice and to overcome antisemitic structures. This volume looks at what became of their ideals, how Jewish life was newly...

Maxim Osipov, who lives and practices medicine in a town ninety miles outside Moscow, is one of Russia's best-regarded writers. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he draws on his experiences in medicine to craft stories of great subtlety and striking insight. Rich in comparison but devoid of cheap sentiment, Osipov's fiction presents a nuanced, collage-like portrait...

Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the most compelling and influential contemporary Ukranian writers, the author of a body of work that ranges from the novel to the essay to poetry and that stands out in every genre for being thoughtful, playful, free-spirited, and astonishingly new. His career took off in the waning years of the Soviet Union, when underground artists and writers and the rumbles of...

There are 100 cards in the set - 80 with images and 20 that are blank. Use them to play 65+ different games and activities and create even more!

Well into his third decade as a poet Gari Light uses his mature voice in Confluences to translate multicultural images and locales… These English poems by Gari have the same energy and elegance as his Russian poems, and they are enriched by his multilayered, polyphonic use of the English language to express thoughts and feelings with sophistication and humor… These poems are like seascapes, or...